Traditional art and sketching

Peruse our Sketching from the Imagination series, start your own sketch journal, or try your hand at clay sculpting! If you’re a complete beginner looking for a new hobby, or even an experienced artist looking for inspiration and workflow insights, our traditional art and sketching resources have plenty to offer!

3D digital art

Covering a wide variety of software and approaches, our books, magazines, and eBooks are there to offer you the support and motivation you need. Whether you want to sculpt a monster in ZBrush or create a stylized character in 3ds Max, take a look at our range to start your next project!

If you’re a fan of sci-fi and monsters, you’re in for a treat with this new issue. We interview Seb Barker, VFX supervisor behind the upcoming Monsters: Dark Continent, and Capcom artist Naru Omori, who’s worked on such videogame series as Resident Evil and Dead Rising. We meet sculptor Jake Anderson’s clay monsters, learn how to create sci-fi vehicles in 3ds Max and Maya, and look at modeling hard-surface robots in ZBrush.

Welcome to our first issue of 2015, packed with great content to kick-start your year! Try modeling rugged sci-fi vehicles in 3ds Max and Maya, or creating an icy cave in ZBrush with Glen Southern, or learning about Render Masks in V-Ray 3.0 with Toni Bratincevic. How about starting some good new habits with our top tips for ZBrush and Maya?

This month’s magazine is chock full of brilliant characters and creatures from a host of talented artists. We’re designing alien monsters and fantastical godlike beings, catching up with pro character sculptor Glauco Longhi, and taking a ride through Jonathan Ball’s technicolor world of teddy bears and giant rampaging robots. Something for everybody!

The Unreal games engine is a hugely versatile system that has been used to power a variety of best-selling video games. In The Unreal Game Engine, environment artist Andrew Finch looks at how to create game levels from scratch using the free Unreal Development Kit, starting with modeling the environment. He then addresses the two different ways in which you can create accessories for your scene – modeling in 3ds Max and importing them, or creating them directly in UDK – before adding textures and lighting. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a level designer and wanted some practical experience, then look no further than The Unreal Game Engine.

At first glance, you'll notice our usual top-notch artwork on the front cover and the usual references to the amazing content inside; but take a look beyond that familiar shell to where our tutorials usually reside, and you'll encounter a brand new design: We've changed our layouts!

This issue we bring you introductions to character creation in both 3ds Max and Maya. To begin, Shareyko Dmitry Petrovich takes a 2D concept by Denis Zilber and shows you how to create reference planes and take it into the third dimension using 3ds Max. Meanwhile, Patrick Evrard gets you started in Maya with his helpful guide to creating stylized characters.